My Favorite Podcasts of 2017

I split my listening time between audiobooks and podcasts. And while I routinely list my favorite audiobooks from each year, I don’t believe I’ve ever done so for podcasts.

I listen to podcasts with Pocket Casts, which I highly recommend. There are versions for Android,iOS, and the web, and while you have to pay for each separately, I just love the app and it’s cloud-based sync capabilities. Highly recommended.

Best podcasts

These are the podcasts I listen to reguarly, if not religiously.

2 Keto Dudes. Carl Franklin and Richard Morris explain the keto lifestyle and demand only one thing from doubters: “Show me the science.” Easily my favorite podcast from 2017, and highly recommended to anyone who sits in front of a computer all day and just gains weight. This is a solvable problem. And these guys can help.

How Did This Get Made? Probably my all-time favorite podcast, though it has gone off the rails with terrible fan-submitted music in recent years. Basically an audio version of Mystery Science Theater, How Did This Get Made? lampoons terrible movies in every other episode. In the other episodes, one of the hosts, Paul Scheer provides more information about the movies they’ve seen. Hilarious stuff. Just skip over the dumb and self-congratulatory music stuff.

The Tim Ferris Show. Kind of a classic in the podcast world, The Tim Ferris Show, like its creator, is far more intelligent and interesting than would be suggested by the title of his first book, The 4-Hour Work Week. This, to me, is the right kind of self-help guidance, and is spans a range of topics—health, fitness, learning, investing/money, and more—and does so with the world’s leading experts. I always make sure to have 10 episodes of this locked and loaded.

Best of the rest

These are podcasts that I listen to semi-regularly, but as with The Tim Ferris Show, above, I like having many episodes of each at the ready for when I’m in the mood.

The Minimalists. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus are The Minimalists, and their podcast neatly highlights the Minimalist movement. Millburn can be a bit much, and Nicodemus can be a bit too little, if that makes sense. But they are clearly great guys who have figured out something that I feel is very important.

Internet History Podcast. Despite—or maybe because—I appear in three tech podcasts every week, I do not listen to tech podcasts regularly. This is the one exception, though I cherry-pick from the episodes to find interesting topics. The interviews of Mike Slade are among my favorites and are a good place to start.

Rolling Stone Music Now. If you like music at all, you need to check this one out. As with the previous podcast, I cherry-pick for my favorite artists and bands.

Revisionist History. There are suddenly a lot of “secret history”-type podcasts (and TV shows), but this is pretty much the classic. The thing about history is that it requires perspective. And the narrative you were taught may not be the complete story.

A few curiosities

I keep a number of other podcasts on hand, and while I won’t highlight them all here, a few are notable.

Highlander Rewatched is a fun example of something I’m seeing a lot of these days: One or more podcasters go back and rewatch the entire run of an old TV series—in this case, Highlander—and cover them as if they were new. Look around, I bet you can find a podcast about a favorite show from the past too.

The Skift Podcast is a curious take on travel in that it usually highlights people in the travel industry rather than destinations or whatever. But I really enjoy it, and more so than any other travel podcast I’ve tried. (I love the whole Rick Steves thing, but I find his weekly podcast to be uninteresting.)

OK, Note to Self to technically about tech, but I only listen to the occasional episode. There are some gems in there.

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